Re: How do I write directly to a memory address?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message 
news:4d51a7bb$0$19486$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net...
> On 2/8/2011 3:11 PM, Shark8 wrote:
>> No, that's not it. What is 'it' is that the C programmers  treated
> > Ada as if it were C and the result was, as expected, bad Ada.
>
> It is my understanding that Ada proponents believe that
> using Ada results in better programs than using C. But
> when presented with a program written in Ada that is not
> demonstrably better, that program is removed from the set
> of Ada programs under consideration by virtue of having
> been written by "C people". That is precisely the "no true
> Scotsman" fallacy.

No fallacy here. 99% of programs (in any programming language) are garbage. 
The 1% that are not garbage are written in a language that supports and 
enforces real contracts. C is not such a language, ergo all of its programs 
are garbage (it might be possible to write some simple functions that aren't 
garbage, but nothing complex). Ada is only *barely* such a language, so most 
Ada programs are garbage as well. Garbage programs might work after lots of 
testing, but they're not engineered in any way.

Lest you think I'm talking about mythical other people, let me say that I 
put Janus/Ada (written almost solely in Ada) in the category of garbage Ada 
programs. It was designed by people (including me, fresh out of college) 
that didn't understand encapsulation and contracts very well, and as such it 
doesn't use them very consistently. It "works", of course, but it suffers 
from a lot of the problems that you might get from a C written compiler. 
With one exception: virtually every problem is detected by the failure of an 
Ada runtime check, so it is rare to get the wrong answer as opposed to no 
answer.

I would in fact argue that Ada is not good enough here; we need more 
contracts than even Ada 2012 can provide. Or we can continue to assume that 
crap is good enough. The world, sadly, is pretty much convinced that is all 
we can do. It surely is with the programming languages in wide use.

                                  Randy.